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Freud, Neuroscience, and Reform Judaism:

A New Look at the Human Constitution
Frank J. Dyer

Surprising as it may seem, the real action in laboratory psychology and neuroscience

today is no longer in the study of psychological disorders. There is a quiet revolution in

the study of normal mental processes going on at the present time that promises to eclipse

the contributions of clinical psychology. Its impact will certainly be felt in academic and

applied psychology. It supplies something that has been lacking in the academic world

for generations, namely, a hard-science evaluation of certain bedrock propositions of

Sigmund Freud‘s theory of the mind. These recent neuroscience discoveries also pose

challenges to current concepts of spirituality and religion, including those of Reform

Judaism.

Today, we are on the brink of an increasing awareness of certain findings of neuroscience

in regard to consciousness-brain-behavior relationships that are just as revolutionary as

was the Theory of Evolution in 19th century discoveries in physical science. Even though

these neuroscience findings now enjoy the same sort of hard science empirical support

that research on biology has lent to Evolution, there is likely to be a much stronger

resistance to this line of research than has been the case with any previous scientific

discovery. The profound disjuncture between the way we experience the normal

operation of our mind -- in planning, deciding, generally making sense out of the world --

and the actual nature of brain-consciousness-behavior relationships as demonstrated by

science, can be both unnerving and demoralizing. The view that Judaism has held of the
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human psyche, or nefesh, for nearly four millennia is simply not in accord with the facts

of science.

Central to the Reform view of ethics and morality is the belief, which we hold in common with

other Jewish religious denominations, that humans possess virtually unlimited free will. We are

entirely at liberty to choose, at any stage, whether we shall proceed in the direction of what is

recognized as lawful, moral, ethical, humane, and constructive, or to make a different choice.

The assumption behind this view is that we are, in our innermost essence, rational beings

completely aware of and in control of our choices, thoughts, and other conscious events. The

Columbus Platform put forward by the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) in 1937

explicitly states “As a child of God, [the human being] is endowed with moral freedom.”

Subsequent statements of Reform Jewish principles have never modified that tenet. Across the

pond, the statement of Reform Jewish beliefs by Rabbi Tony Bayfield of the British Movement

for Reform Judaism lists responsible autonomy among the central tenets. Bayfield writes

“Living Judaism recognizes the existential truth that individuals are free to make their own

choices.”

Such a view corresponds perfectly with the normal experience of our conscious mental

processes. In other words, we feel that we have conscious, voluntary, intentional control

over our actions, proceeding from conscious, voluntary, intentional control over our

thoughts. The CCAR in its 2004 Commentary on the Principles for Reform Judaism

discusses this notion of rational choice and moral responsibility in regard to notions of

sin, tshuvah (return to the right path), and kippur (atonement).

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The Book of Genesis attributes all of the trials and struggles of the human condition to Adam and

Eve’s expulsion from Paradise. Their expulsion, which condemned all future human beings to

the rigors of our present material existence, was the result of an intentional, voluntary choice by

Adam and Eve to defy the Creator’s command and sample the forbidden fruit. The point is clear:

if their choice had been compelled in some way, then Adam and Eve’s defiant act would not have

warranted this extreme penalty. In the biblical account, the Devil did not coerce, but merely

tempted.

The great Reform Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver in his classic text Where Judaism Differs, makes the

case for the religious view of human beings as freely-acting, rational agents. Rabbi Silver cites

medieval Jewish religious authorities such as 12th century Abraham ibn Daud, demonstrating that

the notion of humans as possessing unlimited free will is a basic tenet that has deep roots in

Jewish tradition. It is a concept that Reform Jews have never questioned, let alone abandoned.

The first scientific questioning of this traditional view of the psyche/nefesh appeared in

Sigmund Freud’s writings on psychoanalysis. In Freud’s view, most mental functioning

takes place outside of our awareness. The conscious self is passive and helpless against

unconscious forces that distort, compel, and self-servingly edit our experience. In

Freud’s system, our behavior and choices are not freely-willed, but mechanically

determined by unconscious conflicts. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory provoked a violent

backlash in the scientific community and in the popular press as well. The idea that our

experienced psychological self was somehow false o defective, the puppet of conflicts
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churning in the hidden ocean of the unconscious, was intolerable even for many scientific

minds of the day. Many writers dismissed it out of hand, or else questioned its validity

for anyone apart from the obviously disturbed patients about whom Freud wrote.

Indeed, Freud claimed that, while his scientific discoveries stood at the same rank as

those of Albert Einstein, Einstein’s work was universally celebrated while Freud’s was

irrationally reviled as much as it was lauded by the scientific community and the popular

media. Freud’s view was that Einstein’s work enhanced humanity’s sense of control and

power over the natural world, while his own scientific discoveries disabused us of the

notion that we are rational beings with reasonably complete control over our own mental

processes and behavior. In other words, Freud’s discoveries made us collectively feel

less secure, while those of Einstein enhanced our sense of security in our own

accomplishments as a species.

Because of the way in which Freud arrived at his conclusions, namely the intensive

clinical study of neurotic patients, it was comparatively easy to dismiss psychoanalysis as

just another armchair theory, perhaps the product of biases and fantasies of a psychiatrist

struggling with his own neuroses. The central psychoanalytic concept that our conscious

mental life is actually the end product of unconscious processes in which we neither

participate nor understand was simply unacceptable outside the narrow worlds of

psychiatry, art, and ivory tower academics. It is certainly something with which Reform

Judaism never seriously concerned itself.

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Enter the hard-science neuroscience studies of the late twentieth century. The findings of

neuroscience researchers such as Benjamin Libet, Michael Gazzaniga, and Joseph Ledoux

provide empirical confirmation of the central tenets of psychoanalysis regarding free will,

insight, and the importance of consciousness in mental functioning. Their laboratory studies,

using sophisticated experimental techniques to study the functioning human brain, consistently

support the view that there is no mental activity independent of brain activity, that consciousness

is only a tiny fraction of the activity of the 100 billion neurons that make up the brain, and that

what finally enters consciousness is the product of neuroprocessing that takes place outside of

our awareness. Further, an enormous amount of this neuroprocessing has as its sole purpose the

creation of the subjective sense that we are behaving as rational, cohesive, unitary, freely

choosing agents. In fact, all of our experience represents merely the registering of outcomes of

cooperation, and often competition, among many different brain modules loosely coordinated by

structures in the frontal cortex, which is the area of the brain associated with higher order mental

processes.

A simple mental experiment illustrates the problem nicely. Picture yourself seated at a table with

your right palm placed flat on the tabletop. I ask you to raise your hand at will, not immediately,

but at some time within the next few minutes or seconds, with the exact moment to be entirely

determined by you. You wait for a while, and lift your hand off the table. What comes first: the

thought of lifting your hand at a particular moment, the physical brain activity associated with

lifting the hand, or the action of lifting the hand?

The great majority of people will order these as: 1) THOUGHT--2) BRAIN ACTIVITY--3)

ACTION.
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This is a magic sequence. It assumes that nonmaterial thought can somehow cause brain activity

that sends a neural impulse down to the arm and hand that results in the action. The real

sequence, which was discovered by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet and subsequently verified

over and over again by many other researchers recording brain activity, subjective time, and arm

movement, is as follows: 1) BRAIN ACTIVITY--2) THOUGHT--3) ACTION.

It may seem like a small thing, but this minor change, placing brain activity first, means

that the bedrock quality of our mental life, the belief that we control things through our

conscious thought, is nothing more than an illusion. It is subjectively real, but

objectively false, like the amputee’s experience of a phantom limb. In other words, by

the time we think that we are making the conscious decision and exercising the intent to

lift the hand, the brain has already set the process in motion. It is a done deal before we

decide to do it. We are merely registering the brain’s activity, and not causing it as we

falsely assume we are.

It is as though, to use a computer analogy, we do not think our thoughts in real-time. We are

constantly playing catch-up, our conscious mind always several steps behind a brain that

continuously feeds us content that has already been created outside of our awareness. Our

subjective sense of creating, willing, choosing, freely acting and the like is, in fact, a mistaken

interpretation of a process in which we are only passively registering the activity of a bodily

organ, the brain.

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There has never been a scientifically valid demonstration of any mental event occurring without

a corresponding activity in some region of the brain. That is to say, there is no mind without

brain. No abstract thought, no feeling, no memory, no imagining occurs without some area or

areas of the brain registering neural activity. The brain is primary, carrying on most of its work

outside of our awareness. The mind is secondary, merely receiving what it is fed by the

mechanical operations of the brain. The conscious mind can no more influence the activity of

the physical brain than you could change the plot of a rerun of I Love Lucy simply by watching it

on television.

Is the brain free, morally responsible, and rational? The brain, evolved from earlier

species and developed to adapt to the environment, has both a primitive part and an

advanced part. The primitive part controls emotions, reflexes, and behaviors, among

other things. The advanced part controls language, reasoning, and information

processing. Much of the time the primitive part of the brain causes behaviors that are

against the moral standards, ethical codes, and laws that are supposed to govern our

behavior. The advanced part of the brain expends a great deal of energy in developing

reasons and explanations that make these unwanted behaviors acceptable to us. In other

words, the well known Freudian defense mechanisms such as denial and rationalization

have received substantial validation through modern neuroscience studies of the

functioning brain and its resulting conscious experiences. In short, the brain does what

genetics and learning dictate, and then fabricates a back-story to make us think we are

perfectly justified, with all of this activity including the behavioral decision and the

rationalization, formulated outside of our awareness.

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The following is a vivid example of the kinds of implications that these findings carry for

religious thought and debate. There are respected neuroscientists who advance a purely

biological, and nonmoral, explanation for the Golden Rule. This explanation would also apply to

Hillel’s famous dictum about the essence of Torah being that one should refrain from doing to

others that which one would not have done to oneself, and “The rest is commentary.” Citing

anthropological evidence that Neolithic humans in widely geographically separated communities

all had some version of this principle, the neuroscience explanation is simply that all Neolithic

humans shared the same brain mechanisms for reciprocal fear, which maintains social stability.

The essence of Torah is thus reduced to the interplay between the hypothalamus and the

amygdala evolving from stone age humans. While this theory does not have the overwhelming

empirical support enjoyed by the other neuroscience principles discussed above, it does pose an

intriguing challenge to traditional notions of a divinely inspired basis for moral and ethical

behavior.

What, then, should be the response of a modern and progressive religious faith publicly

committed to respect the advances of science? When we compare the divinely ordained moral

accountability cited in the Columbus Platform of Reform Judaism with the Freudian dictum “To

know all is to forgive all,” it is clearly the latter that is in accord with modern neuroscience. Yet,

a religious movement that came down too heavily on the deterministic “forgive all” side would

risk being seen as having lost its moorings in Biblical tradition.

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There are further questions of a religious nature to which these neuroscience findings inevitably

lead. What is there in us that contains the moral accountability that the nearly four millennia of

Jewish tradition recognizes? Is it in our eternal nature tying us directly to the Creator that such

accountability and free choice reside? And exactly how does this divinely imbued core of the

human being relate to a mechanically functioning brain and a passive consciousness? Is the soul

merely a passive and helpless spectator of the workings of a brain totally determined by the

vagaries of heredity and socioeconomic circumstance?

Just as Reform Jewish thinkers and leaders have grappled with the novel challenges posed by

medical issues such as artificial life support, artificial insemination, and the like, these new

brain-consciousness-behavior issues also demand serious attention. It is incumbent on members

of the Reform movement to become better acquainted with the truths disclosed by modern

neuroscience and to give thought as to how they might be reconciled with a progressive and

scientifically sophisticated Judaism.

The more than 3,000 years of Jewish religious tradition that have inculcated within us the notions

of free will and rational choice are now refuted by hard-science research specifying the

relationship between real-time brain functioning, conscious events, and behavior. These

propositions are no longer a matter of armchair clinical theory that can be readily dismissed.

Ancient traditional wisdom reflected in the Divinely inspired writings of Jewish prophets and

sages bumps up against the fruits of the scientific method, dispelling old notions and vindicating

the prescient clinical insights of Sigmund Freud, one of the greatest scientific minds the Jewish

People ever produced.

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Knowledge, no matter how jarringly uncomfortable, is never bad. Rather than deriding, denying,

or dismissing what is now clearly scientific fact, the task of a modern, rational, and ever-

evolving religious faith is to assimilate, through debate and meditation, troublesome concepts

that may eventually enhance rather than undermine the wisdom of our perspective on the human

condition.